photo credit: Deanna  Towne 

 Anniversary

There is no clean slate

No blank sheets of paper

To write our lives on

We palimpsestically erase

And rewrite existence like

Painters whitewashing

And rescaping canvas

With images telling new stories

Often by another painter

In some other time

With alterative visions

No story is complete

Life goes on in ways

That tells the same story differently

From other sides of truths

Celebrated narratives previously promulgated

Shading views ancestors left

Our stories don’t disappear under

Cover of news but hover like

Ghosts beneath dominant voices

Parchment establishes new anniversaries

With every twist of tongue

Every keyed in message 

Penned privet document

Of lives lived on a record 

Each year unrolls another scroll

Retelling stories to recover

From the pseudology of war

Every lesson confirms that fighting

Is the absolute right thing to do

In my rear view mirror I see

People with bad ideas

About what the world is made of

They will need to learn for themselves

I will need to fight where I can win

I never thought when

I was an undergraduate

Studying philosophy that aesthetics

Would become an over used word

But every time I turn an ear

In the direction of pop culture

Some artist is talking about life

Values and style

Flipping the script to post modernism

Uncomfortably confronting antiquated myths

Deconstructing master stories with

Post-traumatic truth 

Everyday is muffled

In acoustics

Of diamond sprinkled snow

Reflecting how hard

It is to be relevant  

Complete

Whole

We thought we knew

What we could not have known

And it made fools of us

Made us overreach and prevaricate

Had we known better we would have done more

But retrospect is false  

And the clock is relentless

Secretly I like the story so I’m perpetually

Telling it draft after draft in sequels